“Love is beautiful,” my mother told him. “And I know how true that is. But you’re both so young. Don’t you want to live a little more before you settle down? There’s so much to do and so much time to be married.”
“I want to live my life with her,” Eric had said. “I know we have a lot to experience, and I want us to experience it together.”
My mother had smiled. “Well,” she had said. “Then congratulations are in order.”
Looking at Eric across the table, the pizza between us, I thought that maybe her initial hesitation had been right. That we should have lived more. That we did not really understand the vows we’d taken.For better or for worse.Because now here we are, experiencing all that life has to deal out, and it has broken us. It’s broken me.
“I’m going to go to Italy,” I said to him. “I’m going to go on that trip. And I think while I’m gone we should take some space.”
“Well, you’ll be in Italy,” he said. “So space seems inevitable.” He tried for a smile.
“No, like a break,” I said.
I knew in that moment we were both thinking about theFriendsepisode, the ridiculous, impossible idea that a break was somehow a hovering, and not a speeding car out of town. It almost made me laugh. What would it take to take his hand, turn on the TV, and snuggle down together? To pretend that what was happening wasn’t.
“Are you thinking about a separation?”
I felt cold. I felt it down into my bones. “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know what to call it, Eric.”
He turned stoic. It was a look I’d never seen from him before. “If that’s what you want,” he said.
“I don’t know what I want right now except to not be here. You, of course, are free to make your own choices, too.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means whatever you want it to mean. It means I can’t be responsible for you right now.”
“You’re not responsible for me; you’re married to me.”
I stared at him, and he stared back. I got up and put the dishes in the dishwasher and then went upstairs. Eric came to bed an hour later. I wasn’t asleep but the lights were off, and I was pretending, matching my breathing to the rhythm of a light snore. He crept in, and I felt his body next to mine. He didn’t reach for me; I didn’t expect him to. I felt the weight of the space between us, how vast and tense eight inches could be.
And now the Uber is here.
My phone flashes with a number I don’t know. It’s the driver. I pick up.
“I’ll be right out,” I tell him.
Eric inhales and then exhales.
“I’ll call you from the airport,” I say.
“Here, let me help you.”
The driver doesn’t get out. Eric takes my suitcases out to the car. He puts them into the open trunk.
They are filled with dresses and shoes and hats my mother and I picked out together. Every time I’d pack for a trip, she’d come over, even if was just a weekend away. She knew how to fit ten outfits into a carry-on—“The trick is to roll, Katy”— and how to make a pair of jeans last all week. She was the queen of accessories—a silk belt as a headscarf, a chunky necklace to take a white shirt from day to night.
Once Eric is done, we stand facing each other. It’s an unseasonably cool June day in LA. I’m wearing jeans, a T-shirt, anda hooded sweatshirt. I have a voluminous cashmere scarf in my bag, because my mother taught me to always travel with one. “You can curl up against any windowsill,” she’d say.
“So, have a safe trip, then,” he tells me. Eric has never been good at pretending. I am better. The heaviness of our conversation hangs between us. It causes the immediacy of what’s before us—a split, divorce?—to be in direct opposition to the obvious: that we might already be strangers. That we are standing on opposite sides now. I think, briefly: of course people get divorced in wars. When everything has been obliterated, how do you carry on with doing laundry?
I see the pain in Eric’s face, and I know he wants me to reassure him. He wants me to tell him that I love him, that we’ll figure this out. That I’m his. He wants me to sayyour wife will be right back. Your life will be right back.
But I can’t do that. Because I do not know where she or it went.
“Yeah, thank you.”
He moves to hug me, and reflexively I pinch back. People must have hugged me, these weeks. All of those visitors must have put their arms around me. Buried their faces into my neck. But I cannot remember it. It feels like I haven’t been touched in months.
